


such moments we steal like little thieves

by folkloricfeel



Category: The Troop
Genre: F/F, Future Fic, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-08
Updated: 2011-07-08
Packaged: 2017-11-20 00:30:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,776
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/579315
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/folkloricfeel/pseuds/folkloricfeel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hayley Steele's never been cut out for a normal life. Future fic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	such moments we steal like little thieves

**Author's Note:**

> In which Hayley is a diplomat, Felix is a successful engineer and businessman, Cadence is on the wrong side of the law, and Jake is stuck in office job hell and miserable back at home in Lakewood.

Hayley Steele's never been cut out for a normal sort of life.

At thirty-one, she's the youngest current United Nations diplomat of her rank. At thirty-one, she holds an undergraduate degree from Princeton and a graduate from Yale with a twenty-year four-point GPA streak to back them up, owns an apartment in the City, a loft in the business district that most people twice her age could only dream of, is in talks with realtors to purchase a summer condo in Vienna, spends her days spinning around the globe, sipping exclusive-vinted Cabernet and drawing on her high school debate team experience in smooth-talking the rich and influential on the international circuit.

At thirty-one, Hayley's lived half a lifetime fighting monsters and prime ministers and being half in love with someone she'll never have and sometimes normal feels like just another strange creature she caught and captured and vaporized years and years ago.

*

"You _what_?" Hayley nearly drops the dinner pack of chole bhature in her hand, dodging a less-than-friendly look from the man beside her as she ducks out of the freezer case and down a less-crowded aisle in the mart.

"I know, I know, it was stupid, but I was back in Lakewood for the week, and he was _there_ at the bar, and one minute we were fighting and the next we were reminiscing and I don't know, every guy's got to have a weakness, right?" Felix's voice comes at her through the Bluetooth, attempting a balance between sheepishness and self-deprecation. He chuckles as she hesitates in front of the bakery display case, debating the merits of whole wheat or garlic naan. "I can't help it if sometimes mine comes in the form of our favorite painfully closeted former Troop cohort."

"Wait a minute, you were back in Lakewood?" she asks, settling on a pack of the whole wheat. "Why?"

"Doing a series of lectures on electromagnetic radiation principles out at the Developmental Organization for Remarkable Kids," Felix responds, answer interwoven with the sound of an intercom announcement on his end.

"DORK's a real place? I thought it was just a cover for the monst—" she stops, looking over her shoulder at the rush hour crowd milling past her in the mart. "I mean, I thought they shut down back when we were in high school," she finishes, voice slightly hushed.

"No, the school's legitimate, Doctor Nairobi just wasn't. I've been giving lectures for the engineering and science departments off and on for about two years now." She feels like she should've known this, but she and Felix attempting to keep up with the ins and outs of each other's schedules is a lost cause these days. "Why the hell else would I have a regular bar back in _Lakewood_ for Jake to stumble into one night with his impossibly stupid and handsome mug? The place even caters to a straight clientele." He scoffs, and there's a shuffling noise on the other end of the headset, and Hayley lets herself laugh a little. "There are football players from our graduating class that drink there. _Football players_ , Hayley."

"At least you didn't have sex in a public restroom with any of them."

"Touché." Hayley tuts her tongue at him as she slips into a checkout line, and there's more commotion on the other end of the line as Felix sighs. "I should probably find the terminal, my flight boards in a few minutes. If this damn rain doesn't delay it, anyway."

"I should probably get off of here anyway, I'm about to check out," Hayley says, pulling her credit card out of her bag. "When are you actually in town these days?"

"First week in October," Felix says, "Tamasaki only needs me to work with his engineers for a month this time, but Yuki and Keiko invited me out for a few weeks after that." Hayley shakes her head at the mention of their J-Troop compatriots, remembering the international collect call proclamation of _"Felix is getting his Ni-chōme on!"_ from his last trip out to Shinjuku that would've betrayed her old friend for a drunken frat boy instead of a successful engineer and international businessman. "Let's try to get together when I get back? I'm going to need something to look forward to with this fourteen-hour flight staring me in the face."

"I'll be in Switzerland until the end of the month then, but I'll put back a bottle of Chardonnay and my _Breakfast at Tiffany's_ DVD just for the occasion," she says, grinning and putting her basket up on the checkout belt.

"Ah, but you know my everlasting love for fine wine and Hepburn, don't you," Felix says, laughing. "It's a shame you're not a man, Hayley Steele. You'd make a better boyfriend than my last three or four."

"Speaking of, I'm guessing I should expect a panicked phone call from Jake sometime in the next few days, then? 'Help me, Hayley, I slept with the man I've had unresolved sexual tension with for years, where's the Troop manual on how to assert your heterosexuality?'"

"I give it another week or two before the sexuality crisis fully sets in. And trust me, sex at a bar with him in the hometown he's never left does not a boyfriend make," Felix quips, but there's a hint of sadness behind his wit.

"Whatever you say," Hayley chides as Felix pauses to ask someone which direction terminal five is. "Have a safe flight, okay?"

"You take care of yourself, too," he says, voice sincere. "And I promise the next time you hear from me won't be all about my high school boy infatuations and one-night stands."

"The less things in life that revolve around Jake Collins, probably the better," Hayley chuckles, grabbing her bag full of tonight's makeshift Indian feast from the cashier and heading out of the mart. "I'll talk to you later."

Maybe she ought to rescind that statement, though, she thinks as she heads around the corner toward the stairwell of her subway stop, because she's in a better mood than it feels like she's been in for weeks, taking a minute out of a life of memorizing the pronunciation of foreign dignitaries' names to banter with Felix about the boy they used to save the world with once upon a time.

Old friends have a way of lifting your spirits like that, she supposes.

*

The Troop, Mr. Stockley had told the three of them (back when it was just the three of them) once after a particularly dramatic but successful mission, was more than just a necessary service to keep the world safe from its husking draks and vespinoxes. The Troop was their secret to jumping on the fast track to success, a powerful tool that would hone their skills and open doors for them that ordinary kids might never see. They'd dragged the half-exploded carcass of a behemoth back to Troop headquarters, coming down from the adrenaline rush of balancing in a moment between heroism and certain death, and Mr. Stockley had snapped on a pair of rubber gloves and told them that the Troop would be a key to their lives in more ways than they could ever know.

Mr. Stockley, in all his casual wisdom, had never spoken truer words.

Because he'd never told them that one day their monsters would be business-class flights and conference calls and cocktail parties. He'd kept it for them to find out that sonic lash firebombs aren't equipped to vanquish those.

*

October blows her on the wind to an art gallery in Zurich, a private reception for a senior member of the Council of States on his seventy-fifth birthday, and finds her discussing the North Pacific political climate with an aide to the Swedish chancellor. Her date for the evening, the UN ambassador to Liechtenstein, is a distinguished man who's fifteen years her senior and has the same demeanor as half her graduate professors at Yale: overly pressed suit, warm smile, awkwardly placed historical joke to test the waters of his peers' intelligence. Hayley's trained to thrive in this environment, to demonstrate the charm and persuasiveness acquired from years of government service with all the poise of someone who's watched a hundred monsters explode in front of her face without breaking a sweat or emotion, but tonight, she feels dangerously close to slipping off her game. She's realized, as she's gotten older, that even an off-kilter Hayley Steele is an adjustment measured in millimeters; her high school self would be on the verge of a meltdown, but she's still at ease, voice level and laugh lilting even if controlling the rhythm of her small talk takes more effort than usual. It's just the way her throat's tight and heavy, already as she's finishing just her second glass of wine, that keeps her feeling like she's balanced just off the top of an unsteady pyramid formation.

"And that's precisely the challenge, because we've never had the same domestic dependency on North Korea as with the Middle East before solar energy really took foothold with the masses," her companion notes, turning to her for agreement, and Hayley realizes she's lost the past few points of conversation somewhere among the jagged edges of late evening sunlight colliding into the walls from the high windows here. "Here, let me get you another glass, dear," he says when he notices her empty one, but Hayley shakes her head, tells him she ought to find a restroom anyway and excuses herself with a polite nod to the chancellor's aide.

She's winding down a corridor at the peak of a flight of stairs toward where the man behind the bar had directed her when a voice she's trained on instinct to pick up comes at her: "If it isn't the prom queen of the peacekeeping ball, well."

"Please don't tell me you're planning on burning this place down tonight, Cadence? I doubt the Councilman would appreciate you using his cake candles as torches." The sound of Hayley's empty wine glass clattering to the floor betrays the sharpness of her wit. Cadence is wearing the same leather jacket she's had since they were seventeen, leaning back against the wall, and Hayley's vague unease throughout the night clicks into place.

"Don't worry, princess," Cadence tells her, smirking. "No damage to be done tonight." She runs a finger lightly over the canvas hanging on the wall beside her, and the wine coursing through Hayley's bloodstream tells her to hitch a breath. "I'm only here to scope out the place. For a friend."

"How noble of you, to offer your services so selflessly in the good name of art heists," Hayley says, taking a step closer, the familiar mix of fear and endorphins rising at the base of her stomach. "And your loyalty to your fellow criminals was your only motivation, I'm sure."

Cadence cracks a smile, one that's small but makes up for it in genuine expression. "I suppose there are other nights I could've arranged," she says, leaning on her elbow to turn toward where Hayley's made her way over next to her at the wall. "Just your luck this one was most convenient."

"Because breaking and entering past top international security is always the model of ease and expediency."

Cadence reaches out and twirls a stray curl of Hayley's through her fingers, brushes it back into her bun: "you know I'm always one for a challenge," and that other feeling pushes through the fear and endorphins, pushes and propels her all the way to cover Cadence's lips with her own.

Every time they do this, it's fast, needy, and the alcohol in Hayley's system is only amplifying the dizzying effect: Cadence wastes no time slotting a thigh between Hayley's legs, pressing in slow circles as Hayley twists a hand through Cadence's hair right at the base of her neck, fingertips teasing at her scalp. "Cameras?" Hayley whispers, and she swears Cadence shivers as she shakes her head against Hayley's mouth.

"Disabled them," Cadence says, thumbing at the curve below Hayley's breast through her business jacket, "on my way in, didn't think I'd forget, did you?"

Hayley takes it as a signal to flip their positions, pressing Cadence up against the wall and pressing against her. It's as if the alcohol's strengthening rather than dulling her memory: _remember this_ , each swipe of her tongue over Cadence's lips tells her, remember the way it feels to press your thumbs flat into the arch of Cadence's hipbone, remember the way her eyelashes look when she's this close to you, store away for the moments when you'd give anything to be able to remember in sensation and not half-imagination.

It's a deadly game they play, deadly, Hayley thinks as she feels Cadence shift her legs so that the skirt of Hayley's suit hikes up: it's not that everyone in the political realm doesn't have their scandals, their dirty little secrets, but there are a million reasons that the sound of footsteps on the stairs at the other end of the hallway could cost both of them everything, most of all for the way Cadence's nails are sharper than they should be as they dance on Hayley's exposed thigh. "Careful," Hayley breathes, and Cadence pulls herself away for a moment, staring at the inch-long tear along the inside seam of Hayley's hose.

"Sorry," Cadence says, actually blushing a little, and for a second they're in a stall in the girls' locker room at Lakewood during study hall again and Hayley's grabbing Cadence's hand on reflex to still the shimmering glow rippling out from her torso, grabbing onto keep Cadence here and ground her in her humanity. Cadence looks up at her, then back down at their intertwined fingers, and says, "I'm not eighteen anymore, you know," but underneath the amusement is _thank you_ , is something warm in Cadence's eyes that says Cadence the woman isn't going anywhere.

It's a deadly game they play, but then again, Hayley's been brought up on those.

Cadence runs a hand over Hayley's cheek, pulling her back in for a kiss as she thumbs at her chin, and flips them over again, the cool stone of the wall hitting against the sliver of skin at the small of Hayley's back. She lets her thumb drag over the rip in Hayley's hose, drag slowly enough to elicit a moan that gets stifled at the back of Hayley's throat, before trailing back over the fabric to tease at the point where Hayley's thighs meet. "Shit," Hayley hisses, and Cadence draws back a little to smirk.

"Is that any way for Lakewood's golden girl to be talking? Wouldn't want to wind up in detention," she leans in to whisper in Hayley's ear, "I hear the ones you meet there are up to no good," and the singsong tease in Cadence's voice makes Hayley want to grab Cadence by the shoulders and kiss the smirk off her face, so she does, sliding a hand down the front of Cadence's jacket to cup her breast against her palm in the process.

Cadence outright whimpers at that, and it's Hayley's turn to smirk. "Not so stoic after all, are we, tough girl?" she asks, walking her fingers down Cadence's stomach to the button of her jeans, which she pops open, dragging the zipper down with thumb and forefinger and slipping her palm inside. Cadence answers that by pressing her own palm firmly against Hayley, thumb twisting achingly slow circles, until Hayley's got no choice but to pull Cadence in for a kiss just to keep quiet.

They know each other's bodies well enough by know to know exactly how to play this: the tensing of Cadence's shoulders tells Hayley to slow down, the flushing of Hayley's neck for Cadence to speed up, until they're both on the edge and their own hands are shaky in the patterns they're working at. "Come on," Cadence whispers, lips slotted unevenly against Hayley's, but Hayley wills away the building pressure behind her eyes and at the base of her spine long enough to shake her head.

"Not until you do," and with a flick of Hayley's fingertips Cadence is shaking, shaking, biting at Hayley's lower lip with shaking hands that don't take long to bring Hayley over with her, her knees buckling so much that Cadence has to press against her to keep her from sliding halfway down the wall.

When Hayley opens her eyes again, Cadence is staring back at her, one hand flat against the wall to steady herself, eyes wide and smiling as she quietly gasps for breath. "Damn," is the first thing Hayley can think to say, and it comes out around a grin playing at her own lips. This is the part that should be awkward, that should be hard and betraying the first tugs at bittersweet, that should be a million things but always leaves her feeling warmer, safer than there's any way she should. Cadence leans over and collapses her head on Hayley's shoulder, and it's in the moments like this where Hayley slips an arm around Cadence's shoulder that she thinks how impossibly small Cadence feels for a woman with something so massive and inexplicable trapped inside her.

Those are the moments when she doesn't want to let her go.

She feels Cadence breathe against her shoulder, feels her own heartbeat thudding at rhythmic odds against Cadence's, and it takes a moment before either one of them move to straighten themselves up. "Better get back to your party," Cadence says, buttoning her jeans and tugging at the hem of her jacket from where it had started to slip down her shoulder. "Your public's waiting for you down there."

"It's not as exciting as it sounds," Hayley says, smoothing down her skirt over the lengthening run in her hose, and now more than ever she wishes there were a special laser, a secret stun ray of sorts to buy her another few moments away from being Hayley Steele, but there never was one of those even back at headquarters, was there. Cadence brings a hand under Hayley's chin and pulls her up to eye level.

"Your lipstick's smudged, princess," she says, swiping a thumb at Hayley's lips, and then she's turning, slipping down the hallway and out of sight with Hayley left to collect her discarded wine glass up from the middle of the floor.

*

The first time she kisses Jake, there are sparks, literal sparks that flicker behind their heads from an exploding grid at Troop headquarters and she's seventeen and naïve for a moment and wonders if it's a sign.

The first time she kisses Cadence, it's in the alleyway behind the Lakewood High football stadium and Cadence's eyes go so wide they flash red and she's gone for two days from school while they're tracking the sudden surge of vampire moth carcasses and she's seventeen and naïve for a moment and wonders if signs are what you make of them when you're in the business of looking.

*

Hayley moves into her loft the weekend she turns twenty-eight, and she's in the process of leveling a frame on the wall when there's a ring of her doorbell. The face that greets her is too familiar and not all at once, index finger of one hand curling in a wave while the other tugs down a pair of stylish prescription sunglasses to bat eyelashes at her.

"Oh, god, Felix, get in here before someone sees you," she says, grabbing him by the wrist, and he just giggles as he's yanked into the apartment, nearly dropping the bottle of wine in his other hand.

"That's Felice to you, sweetheart," he says in an affected voice, fluffing his platinum blond wig and surveying the bare-bones living room.

"Did you actually walk up here like this?" she asks, closing the door behind him and smacking his arm a little when he nods. "I'm shocked the doorman let you in, it's a $7K a month building and you look like you're charging seven dollars an hour in Jersey."

"Not only that, but I got his number." Felix winks as he holds up a slip of paper, and Hayley just shakes her head. He drops his purse on the cardboard box that's serving as a coffee table at the moment and walks over to drop the wine bottle off on the kitchen bar counter. "I figured you could use a girlfriend to help you get this place broken in right. Or what's here of it so far, anyway."

"Sorry about that," Hayley says, collapsing on the sole present couch, "most of the furniture doesn't get delivered until Monday morning."

"It's okay," Felix says, sitting down next to her and patting her knee. "Feels more like a celebration this way. It'll be like we're back in college, threadbare and toasting our first weekend away from our parents, the inviting smell of burnt Ramen noodles wafting in from the stove."

"You went to MIT on a full ride and I lived in a three-story sorority house that was on the register of National Historic Places."

"A girl can pretend, can't she?"

Hayley just picks the pillow up from underneath her elbow and tosses it at him.

An hour later, they're half-drunk and sprawled out on the couch like teenagers, flipping through the DVR's on demand programming poking fun at reality television, Felix having finally given up on trying to get Hayley to read the adult pay-per-view summaries out loud. They're laughing and Felix is pointing out exactly what he'd do if given the chance to some supposedly devastatingly handsome designer on an interior decorating competition show, and Hayley's feeling more unwound than that time the monster had turned her into a lisping nerd and she couldn't care less.

"Why didn't we ever do this back when we were younger?" she asks, interrupting Felix as he's describing in vivid purple prose all the ways Designer Guy's ass in those jeans makes him want to nail things into the wall too, and Felix pauses for a moment, considering.

"We were too busy," he says, shrugging. "You were too busy being Hayley Steele to loosen up and have fun and realize I existed for more than programming grid systems, I guess." It's something that should sting, for a reason halfway between its truth and what it doesn't quite voice of the things that kept them busy afternoons that weren't spent trapped in invisible mime boxes, but there's no malice in Felix's voice. "We were too busy with ourselves to notice what good friends we'd make."

"You mean you were too busy lusting to no avail after Jake to notice you had a third wheel," she jokes, nudging him with her elbow as she finishes off her glass and pours another.

"You were never a third wheel," Felix says with a wink, "I mean, what would we have done without you, we'd have been dead a hundred times over."

"Thanks, I feel so loved." Hayley groans, but her eyes are squinting into a smile. "Do you ever—" she stops, and Felix looks at her curiously. "Never mind."

"Do I ever what?" Felix is studying her, having all but forgotten about Designer Guy's ass and turning toward her, and Hayley's not sure if it's the fear, that fear that Mr. Stockley had always said comes with age, or the lack of it that's making her hesitate to voice this.

"Do you ever miss it?" and Felix's overly mascaraed eyes immediately echo back that he not only knows exactly what she means but he feels it too.

"Only every day for the past decade," he says, leaning back on the couch. "We used to be heroes. How could you not miss that?"

"We used to fight monsters every day," she says, and it's like a strange weight off her shoulders to say the word she hasn't quite formed in years. "We used to blow insects with ten eyes up and spend hours scrubbing green goo off our clothes before we let our parents have our laundry baskets."

Felix is staring off at the television set, staring at something she's sure she couldn't quite see even if her eyes were focusing right. "Tell me something, Hayley," he says suddenly, tilting his head to the side far enough that his wig slides an inch or so down his forehead. Hayley squints her eyebrows in confusion, and Felix shrugs. "Anything. Something you've never told anyone before. If we're in the mood for drunken confessions, let's do it up right."

There's a thought tingling at the back of Hayley's brain, and she wonders if she's drunk enough yet for it. "All right," she says, taking a gulp that engulfs a good third of her glass for good measure, "you remember Cadence, right? She moved to Lakewood just before you left for International?"

"Cadence Nash, sure, the bad girl," Felix says, curling his fingers into air quotes. "Jake had a thing for her for about a week there. What about her?"

"We kissed," she starts, and looks to Felix for a sign. Felix's face doesn't flinch. "The week after Jake and I did. And we didn't stop." She swallows, and there's no wine there to coat the lump in her throat with a warm burn. "For. Not for a while."

"And?"

"What 'and,' you jerk?" She fakes a scandalized gasp and shoves him playfully, enough to momentarily topple her balance on the couch as well.

"Oh come on, you dated Jake for half a year," he says, holding back a laugh. "And you're the smartest person I know, which only leaves one viable reason for being Jake Collins' girlfriend."

"You—what—" she splutters, laughing, and Felix just shakes his head.

"It just so happens that I snatched a top-line model gaydar from Troop headquarters before I left Lakewood," he jokes, then looks at her expectantly. "And?"

Hayley exhales.

"And she's half blood thrasher."

Felix lets out a low whistle. "Damn, you're bringing out the big guns right off," he says. "Whatever happened to her? I heard she skipped college and got caught up with some guys doing jewel heists in Italy or something." Hayley just shrugs noncommittally as he finishes off his glass. "Guess this makes the criminal thing make more sense after all."

"Wouldn't know," Hayley lies, "we. We lost touch years ago."

"Well, that blows my secret," Felix says, patting a hand on Hayley's knee and flipping his wig off his shoulder.

"Oh, no you don't," she scolds him, holding up the now-empty bottle of wine as means of question. Felix nods, and she steadies herself on her feet to head out to the kitchen for another. "Spill, Garcia."

"Remember that time we finally caught the behemoth, a month or so there before I left, and Jake was the one who saved me at the last minute?" Felix asks from across the bar at her, and she nods, standing over the fridge. "I blew him. As a show of my appreciation."

"Shut up," Hayley scoffs, but her eyes go wide as Felix just nods his head smugly from over the bar.

"He cried."

"Oh my god, you actually did."

"Yep. Cried on my bed for half an hour."

"Seriously, shut up."

"He probably still cries when he thinks about it. Cries in his sad, gray little cubicle back in Lakewood about how I give better head than any of the girls he's hooked up with since."

Hayley's hands are unsteady enough already that she has to lick a decent amount of wine off the back of her palm when she pops the cork, and Felix just laughs as she flops back down on the couch and settles in to pour them another glass, and maybe it's not quite a celebration, but it's a good night for drinking, at least.

She grins.

"And?"

*

It's an unspoken sort of thing that Troop kids stick together, for the most part: even when life pulls you apart, there's still something tethering you to the two or three other people in the world who know what it's like to cheat death before seventh period calculus, and it's a tether that sometimes seems to grow tougher over time, no matter how hard you pull against it. For her and Felix, it's been the tethers of an unexpected bond, but even with Jake, it stays taut and sinewed even as much as she'd like to sever the damn thing in half with a pocket knife half the time. Jake's job brings him into the city occasionally, a few business trips a year over the tedious affairs of middle management housekeeping, and Hayley always makes sure to swing an invitation his way if she's hosting a cocktail party or taking a group out for dinner and drinks. Half the time, he's an awkward lump and makes his trademarked face at anyone who tries to talk to him until they leave him alone in his misery to nurse a Manhattan on the rocks off in the corner—and that's the half where he's the most agreeable, if she's being honest. Still, he shoots an email her way whenever he's going to be in town, and she spares a place at the dinner table, because turning your back on a former Troop mate feels wrong, even if they are half-insufferable and half-disagreeable Troop mates you can't remember for the life of you why you used to find mildly attractive even in the midst of a teenage identity crisis.

It doesn't mean she can't vow every damn time after that it's the last time she invites him to anything and spend days grumbling into her Bluetooth at Felix about it all, though.

The last time, before Switzerland, had been at the beginning of the spring, a dinner party and drinks for a friend's promotion, and one of her coworkers had spent half the evening eyeing the line of his biceps through his suitjacket from across the table, much to Jake's apparent ignorance or blatant disregard. She'd cornered him in the kitchen after the first hour or so and used less tact than usual in fending off his mumbled excuses about stress at work or the shadow of another failed relationship as he'd topped his glass off with whiskey and hesitated about trudging back into the dining room.

"If you want me to be perfectly honest, Jake," she'd told him under her breath, keeping her voice under the murmur of conversation around the corner, "I think you're content to keep feeling sorry for yourself because you're too damn scared to look at the reasons why and do anything about it," slowing her words enough to toss them onto the mass of vague implications that they'd been piling for years now.

"I think you should mind your own damn business, Hayley," he'd shot back at her, one of the few times she remembers hearing Jake swear, at least in that way. "Not like you'd understand, with your nose in everyone's prestigious business and all."

"I _understand_ ," she'd hissed, "that you apparently left every bit of the courage you used to have the day you walked out of Troop headquarters. And that's not the Jake I used to know."

"You just, you don't get it, okay?" He'd sighed and clinked his glass down on the counter, rubbing his forehead with his palm and putting the other hand in his pants pocket. "You and Felix—you never had to try. You had all this handed to you on a fucking silver platter. You've gotten everything you've ever wanted in life, and I'm stuck at a dead-end job crunching numbers and staring at the bald spot of the guy who works in the cubicle ahead of me." He runs a hand through his hair, and Hayley wills the temperature of her blood's boil to spike down a few degrees. "I just, I'm tired of your sympathy. If you want to keep inviting me to these things, be my guest, but don't expect me to act like life's as easy for me as it is for you, okay?"

Hayley's fingers tighten around the flute of her glass, but to her credit, her voice stays steady. "Wallow in self-pity all you want, but don't," she starts, "tell me anything about how hard it is to be poor little Jake Collins." Jake actually looks a little startled at that, and she realizes her tone must convey more vitriol than she'd even intended. It's the one time she's actually let herself come apart in front of Jake, said the things she's wanted to and knows she'll regret as immediately as she does. "You have no idea how easy life is or isn't for me. You might with Felix, if you paid some goddamn attention once in a while," and Jake's expression is unreadable at that, "but pay some attention to your own life before you start critiquing mine."

It had taken Jake months to get his tail out from between his legs after that one, months until the voicemail that had inevitably come, at Felix's prediction, a few weeks before she'd headed out to Zurich, but when Jake's name had flashed across her Blackberry, irritated as she still might have been, there'd been a flash of guilt that had cut through her when she'd hit ignore, the snapback of a tether as the ring had cut to silence.

*

The one time Hayley asks, they're back at the apartment she'd spent her last two years of graduate school in, and the fact that they're in a bed for once, in a bed and staying there, is at least half the reason for her courage. She'd come home from a late seminar to the outline of Cadence's form outside her door, smoking a cigarette, arms leaning against the second floor walkway of her building. Unannounced has been Cadence's way for years, almost as long as they've been away from Lakewood, but Cadence's orbit through Hayley's life is steady if irregular, and Hayley's hardly taken by surprise anymore. Perhaps it's her old monster hunter instincts at work, or perhaps it's the vague fear that burns at the pit of her stomach even now, burns stronger in adulthood the way Mr. Stockley had always said it would, the vague fear she fights through whenever the night makes the red flecks in Cadence's eyes more pronounced than usual, but more often than not these days, there's a pull, a tug at something inside of herself that drifts into her perception one day, and then there's Cadence, restless as ever even as the slightest hints of lines start to creep in and soften the corners of her eyes, weigh down her smile.

She invites Cadence in, invites her in for a drink because it's Friday and she doesn't have to go into panic mode for her presentation next week for another thirty-six hours or so and because Cadence steps through the front door with a sparkle of curiosity instead of the reflexes of a caged animal, making a sarcastic quip about the posh décor of the brown shag carpeting and slatted window blinds. She invites Cadence in and the next thing they know, they're fumbling at buttons and toppling backward through the doorway of Hayley's bedroom, tossing articles of clothing behind them and collapsing in a tangle of skin on Hayley's crisp cream-white sheets. She invites Cadence in and the next thing she knows, she's fisting her hands into the bedsheets and arching her neck against the headboard as Cadence mouths at the curve of her bellybutton and braces her hands at the back of Hayley's knees, and god, it feels like fear and want and the thrill of a good capture all wrapped up in a narrowing tunnel of sensation that finds its base at the tip of Cadence's tongue and Hayley squeezes her eyes shut as tight as she can to keep herself on the edge for as long as possible.

Cadence doesn't reach for her shirt right away, doesn't coil away or fight back the sparks of transformation as she's fighting to muffle the shout rising inside of her as she comes, this time. She folds herself into Hayley's side as Hayley slides back up the length of the bed to meet her, just closes her eyes, and if Hayley lets herself slip into one of the moments where she believes they can stay this way, it's because of the way Cadence's hair falls onto her shoulder, because of the way her thumb and forefinger trace at the length of Hayley's collarbone in a way that Hayley could swear screams, _ask me. I'm waiting. Just do it._

And so she does.

"Stay," Hayley breathes, voice still uneven herself, and Cadence's eyes glance up at her in a way that plays at absentmindedness but doesn't even come close to convincing either of them.

"Hmm?" she mumbles, still tracing patterns into her collarbone, and Hayley calls up on reserves of courage she hasn't used in years.

"Stay with me," she says. "We could. It could work. You could stay here, and when I finish school, you could come clean and we could start over and move to New York and—"

Cadence puts a finger to Hayley's lips. "You're months away from a law degree from Yale and I'm half a freak show," she tells her, and Hayley feels her start to curl in on herself already but grabs her hand and turns to face her before she can pull her knees up too far on the bed.

"You haven't turned in years. Not really," she says, and even though there are hundreds and hundreds of days of anecdotal evidence she doesn't have to back that assertion up, they both know it's the damned truth. It's the way with monsters, Hayley knows, they fade over time: in adults' perceptions, in the bravery to stand up to them, even in the fire of attack that burns within themselves. Monsters are the lore of children, and at twenty-six, she knows Cadence is fading more and more into humanity with every passing day; she knows they could have more normal days than not, knows they could hold on and fight the moments that separate the supernatural and the mundane.

She knows, too, though, the fight's never been the question, has it.

Cadence doesn't protest, doesn't insist all the reasons she could never be part of Hayley's world, just tucks a knee around Hayley's legs and curls herself into her side with a sigh like she's milling the possibilities over in her head, and when Hayley wakes up, she's gone, a note left on the counter that says in simple lettering, _thanks, princess_ , and whether it's anything for more than the empty glass of orange juice next to it is more than she can say.

*

On their last day at Troop headquarters, five days before graduation, Mr. Stockley had pulled them each into a hug, and, in a valiant effort to fight back his emotions, given them one last piece of advice: "Don't stop fighting," he'd told them. "Don't think the fight stops here. Don't ever think the fight stops here."

She'd been sure back then, at eighteen and ready to save the world in a new way, that she'd known what he meant; she's sure now, when his words come back to her staring out the window of an airplane somewhere halfway over the Atlantic on her way back to the city, back to her daily office and her subway routes and the half-dozen voicemails from Jake and Felix that are surely waiting for her attention the minute she steps off the runway, that she doesn't have a clue yet to the half of them, and maybe that's the point.

There's a tug at the base of her stomach as the flight attendant's voice announces they'll be experiencing minor turbulence for the next fifteen or twenty minutes, the tug of something tethering her halfway across the Atlantic in one direction or another, and for a minute she lets herself fancy that there's a cloud of seven-winged kritlaks clustering at the wings of the plane instead of a current of stormclouds, closes her eyes and lets normal feel like just another strange creature she caught and captured and vaporized years and years ago.

There aren't any monsters but the stuffed suits all around her staring out at gray skies when she opens them again, but the tug's still there, and for now, it's just far enough from normal to do.


End file.
